Train your employees
One of the best defenses against information breaches to a company is its employees, and they may not even know it. Some common breaches that have occurred in companies have been linked to opening an email or not following proper security procedures. In these cases, the best and most cost-effective way to combat this is security awareness training.
Training can save companies the time and money to purge their systems of any ransomware, whaling, or phishing attacks. Ransomware is an international problem, in the first three months of 2016 the FBI estimated the costs of ransomware attacks to be more than $209 million. Most of this is occurring because the computer user is clicking on dangerous links, due to the lack of awareness of understanding what material could be dangerous.
Executives can be targets
In January 2016, a massive whaling attack happened at an aircraft company called FACC, and they lost €40.9 million Euros in annual profits. Whaling attacks are usually C-level fraud and business email scams. These tend to involve targeting high level executives with forged emails asking for urgent payments.
Companies should have policies in place which would protect the organization from any internal threats. The employees should receive training so they understand these security risks and the consequences of violating them.
Security awareness training is key
Creating a security awareness program within a business has the potential to decrease the possibility of breaches. One training piece could be conducting spear-phishing attack scenarios in your organization to get a baseline of which users are clicking on suspicious types of emails. There are many training avenues to explore when crafting an awareness program. The most important thing is to build it based on your environment and how adept the employees are. There are some training points that you may need to spend more time on than others as the goal here is to have effective clear and concise training.